Move mail folder to other partition

[ladless]

Hello.

I am the latest Centos distro and the latest cPanel version.

As you know all users have their stuff in the /home folder.

Now, I have /home/user/mail. The "mail" folder contains all the e-mail accounts listed under that user account.

However, I want to change the location of this to another partition, let's say /usr or /var for example.

Would a symlink work with this ?

I am in great need of disk space and the /home partition only has 50gb as /usr has 200gb.

Thank you very much.

[cPanelTristan]

Most partitioning schemes have /home with the most space, especially cPanel-based machines. Why precisely was /usr given 4x the disk space over /home partition?

Maybe you would want to have some accounts writing to /usr instead such as /usr/home for new accounts. If you create an area for new accounts to go there, then you should be able to use WHM > Basic cPanel & WHM Setup area for this section:

Additional home directories matching the following value will also be used for new home directory creations. (Leaving this value blank disables the feature.) This option only takes one value.

Examples: “home” matches /home, /home2, /newhome, /usr/home, /anythingwith/homeinit

To have new user accounts put into /usr/home instead of /home due to it having more disk space. It would be better to have a secondary partition (/usr/home) being used for the new accounts over trying to move existing data and symlink it in /home

[ladless]

Thank you very much for you kind answer.
Everything you said is correct and known to me. Unfortunately I don't have a choice. I only have 2 accounts and never will have more than these 2. Thing is the mail folder is getting bigger and bigger and I have only two choices (?):
somehow increase the free space on /home partition by taking space from /usr and/or /var (each of them is of 200GB)
OR
move the /home/user/mail folder to one of /usr or /var partition and trick cPanel with a symlink.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thank you.

[cPanelTristan]

If you are going to do this, please ensure that you have full backups before trying to move the folder to another partition. I cannot say the results as I've never tried it previously. If you have full backups, you can at least restore the account or folder if needed.

I did do some basic testing doing the steps below by moving the mail folder for a testing domain and then symlinking it back. After performing those steps, I was still able to create new email accounts, log into webmail interface and send a test email from Roundcube. So those areas appear to still function per the very quick test I performed.

For moving it, all you'd do is the following (please do not create the email folder beforehand and let it be created with the move command):

mv /home/username/mail /usr/username-mail

A move normally maintains the permissions, so you should then be able to do the symlink:

cd /home/username
ln -s /usr/username-mail mail

Please replace username in all instances to the cPanel account username.

[ladless]

Very comprehensive and helpful. I will engage in this hopefully this weekend. Thank you so much (this reminds me why I paid 400+ bucks for this tool).

Will test this and will let you know.

Thank you !

[ladless]

So, here's my reply as promised.
I am able to send/receive e-mails after moving the mail folder as instructed above.
note that I issued the command

/sbin/service exim stop

before the actual mv command and

/sbin/service exim start

after it completed.
Lots and lots of e-mails so patience was my ally. I opened up another SSH instance and monitored the transfer with 'df' command.

So, in addition to your tests I add mine and I confirm that so far all is good.

Thank you very much again !

[ladless]

Hello again.

After almost one year now... It has come to my attention, now that I am migrating the user-accounts from this server to a new one, that the e-mails weren't transfered.

Also, neither the backup process that is built-into cPanel has ever backed up the e-mails because they were located in /usr/username-mail... not in /home/username/mail (as they should be by default)...

Are there any chances for me to backup the e-mails with the built-in backup function (that apparently doesn't know how to follow the @mail symlink in /home/username/) or should I write a script to just tar them where they are and then rsync them on a backup server ?

Also, as I was saying, I am now migrating the account on a new server... of course the migration process took care of everything except for the e-mails... (sheeeesh ! lots of hassle for that first partitioning mistake).

So, I've let the migration function finish, everything went smooth and I did the same steps like in the above posts with symlinks and now I am using rsync to copy the /usr/username-mail from the old server to the new /usr/username-mail on the new server...
Should I expect this to succeed properly ? (119GB transfer gave me the time to write this)

Thanks !

[cPanelTristan]

Backups will not follow symlinks, so this would not be backed up. It would have been more advisable (as originally suggested) to have set the accounts to /usr/home and have them create there without using symlinks. As you are now doing, you'd manually copy over those mail folders to the new machine. I would suggest having mail collect in the default /home location on the new machine rather than continuing to use this setup provided you have sufficient space in /home on this server

[ladless]

I understand. Well, the rsync has finished successfully and all the e-mails were copied without any problems. I've set up a cron job that triggers a zipping of the mail folder and then uploads the tar to a remote backup server. Everything works as expected.

However, is there a way to increase the space on a partition by taking up space from another one ? I know this is possible in Windows using numerous tools but I don't know if this is possible in linux. I understand that ext3 can support live resizing... would this work with the appropriate tool ?


Thanks.

[cPanelTristan]

You can attempt to resize a partition using space from another partition. The most typical type of resizing is for /tmp partition. I cannot really recommend how to do it, since I wouldn't recommend resizing any partition other than /tmp on a production machine.

[ladless]

I see... I wanted to resize /home (currently 200GB) and take size space from /usr (1TB)... Thank you.

[cPanelTristan]

On a machine currently in production with active accounts? If so, again I cannot recommend doing that.

[ladless]

Yes... I'm afraid so... I will seek some advice in the Centos forums... Perhaps they have met this situation before and can advise me how to do it...

[pkiula]

Did you ever get around to doing this? I need the opposite help. I need to move away space from my massive /home folder to the /usr folder.

Filesystem    Type    Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
...
/dev/sda5     ext3    9.7G  2.6G  6.7G  28% /
/dev/sda7     ext3    152G   16G  128G  11% /home
/dev/sda3     ext3    9.7G  9.3G     0 100% /usr
...
/usr/tmpDSK   ext3    2.0G  473M  1.5G  25% /tmp

I want to move some space from that /dev/sda7 ("/home") into the /usr folder.

What's a good way to do this? How do I ensure that the "free" part of the /home folder is given away to the /usr folder?

Thanks!

[ladless]

Hello,

I didn't had the time to work on this yet, but instead I used a 'work-around' with symlinks to 'trick' the system and buy me some more time until I will have the time to put down the box and try a partition resize.

Sorry I can't help you more now.